Found a Time magazine at an estate sale from Aug. 28, 1972 with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, my fellow Greek-American featured on the cover. They had just won the 1972 presidential election but look none too happy on the cover. The story, entitled, "Once More With Feeling," seems ironic. They look so deadpan. No happiness. No smile. "Once More With Cheating" is more like it. Watergate was just ahead and about two years later, Aug. 1974, and Nixon would resign.
But I'm more interested in the aesthetics from 1972. Bet you would have a big smile from a victorious president in today's mass media. Smiling was probably considered too effeminate in those days. But let's look at the magazine. First page-- an ad for VW bugs and they cost $1,999 in those days, at least that was the Suggested Retail Price. McGovern compared the bombing of Vietnam to the Holocaust, "the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler." Time magazine felt such rhetoric was "difficult to excuse." Nowadays Obama's Healthcare plan is compared to Katrina and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. So much for loose rhetoric.
Page 26 featured an article on Club Med. Around Europe "nudity has reached epidemic proportions." The article featured some topless pics from St. Tropez. Sixties revolution!
An El Al airplane bound for Tel Aviv was rocked by a bomb explosion. The bomb was brought on board by two British girls, unaware the cassette player given to them by two guys, either Iranian, Pakistani or Indian, was rigged with a bomb. Luckily the plan landed safely. The bomb exploded at low enough altitude to blow a hole in the fuselage but not bring down the airplane with 140 passengers.
Oui magazine, a Hugh Hefner product designed ostensibly for both males and females, came out with a first issue. The European style magazine lasted until 2007. Who knew?
The great Oscar Levant died at 65 years.
The world readied for the 1972 Olympics and eleven African nations declared they would not participate if white-supremacist Rhodesia was allowed to compete. Remember what happened at the 1972 Olympics in Munich-- the Black September terrorist takeover and massacre that left 11 Israeli athletes murdered along with the killing of a German police officer and 5 terrorists.
A Chevy Vega with a zinc chloride battery ran for "three uninterrupted hours," a 150 mile trip at 50 mph, an early attempt at electric car transportation.
And, on a more optimistic note than today's situation, Tijuana, Mexico "was parading a new-found reputation as a respectable, commercially solid city, frocked out in its Sunday best for a three-week international trade show called Mexpo." The article points out that the caesar salad was invented by Alex and Caesar Cardini "one evening to feed the throngs in their beleaguered restaurant." Necessity again proved to be the mother of invention!
The magazine proves our inability to see the future-- as always we have 20-20 hindsight while the future, and even the present, can barely be detected.
The Time subscription went to a guy named Sabino Pesce on Farragut Rd. in Brooklyn. Maybe Joe Pesci's uncle?
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